Danilo Dolci - Environmental Education and Empowerment

The book presents the multi-faceted opus of Danilo Dolci within the framework of Environmental Education, focusing on his work as a grassroots community educator, nonviolent activist and poet. It illustrates Dolci's 'Reciprocal Maieutic Approach', a dialectic method of inquiry that can be defined as a process of collective exploration, taking as point of departure the experience, culture and intuition of individuals, ultimately directed towards the development of citizenship. Sessions led by Dolci in Sicily from the 1950s to the 1990s gave rise to the development of action plans that aimed to empower individuals, transform communities and, extending far beyond this, towards the planning and implementation of changes that would have a dramatic impact at a global and planetary level.



Dr Abele Longo is MA Translation Programme Leader in the Department of Education at Middlesex University, London. His main research interests relate to Italian cinema and literature, and audiovisual and literary translation, encompassing perspectives from ecocriticism to environmental education and questions of identity and exile. His publications include: 'Roma, viandanza dell'esilio. Rafael Alberti tradotto da Vittorio Bodini' in N. di Nunzio and F. Ragni (Eds.) (2014) 'Già troppe volte esuli' Letteratura di frontiera e di esilio, Morlacchi Editore, Perugia; 'The Cinema of Ciprì and Maresco: Kynicism as a Form of Resistance', in W. Hope (Ed.)  (2010) Italian Film Directors in the New Millennium, Cambridge Scholars Publishing; 'Subtitling the Italian South', in J. Díaz-Cintas (Ed.) (2009), New Trends in Audiovisual Translation, Multilingual Matters, Bristol; 'Palermo in the Films of Ciprì and Maresco', in  R. Lumley and J. Foot (Eds.) (2004) Italian Cityscapes, Culture and Urban Change in Contemporary Italy, Exeter University Press. His play Il Valzer di Vittorino was staged by Ippolito Chiarello in Italy in 2009. In the field of poetry he edited and contributed to Pugliamondo (Accademia di Terra d'Otranto, 2010), La Versione di Giuseppe (Accademia di Terra d'Otranto, 2011) and Un sandalo per Rut (Accademia di Terra d'Otranto, 2014). He is one of the featured poets in an anthology dedicated to poets from the South of Italy, Il rumore delle parole Poeti del Sud, edited by Giorgio Linguaglossa (Edilet Edizioni Letterarie, 2015). His poetry collection Reversibilità was published by Accademia di Terra d'Otranto in 2012. He is the English correspondent for the literary journal Menabò (Edizioni Terra d'ulivi).